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Since arriving at Snowbasin, Michael Rueckert has leaned into a sports marketing background to bring a long list of clever strategies, messages, and visuals to the marketing quiver of a resort that has a ton of momentum. I never expected, however, that the angle I’d be most interested in gleaning from Michael would be his adventures building a SaaS side project to help resorts (and other brands) monitor and optimize their visibility on AI. As a huge fan of both side projects and resort marketing, I got in touch with Michael to get the scoop on his tool, Snowbasin’s AI strategy, and where all this is headed.

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Gregg: I’ll be honest, it took me a minute to really wrap my head around the fact that platforms like ChatGPT were going to be a significant, new way people were going to research travel, make decisions around ski purchases, etc. Did you see that connection right off? Did it take you a while? Talk about what led to that realization for you and your early view of how you started to see AI influencing the resort industry?

Michael: I’ve always been an early adopter of AI and am the person that most of my friends and family found out about ChatGPT from. While I certainly knew it would be transformational and likely overtake travel planning, this idea really came in late 2024 when Google was the first model to release Deep Research. I jumped on their paid plan immediately and started generating reports for Snowbasin. That’s where it all clicked for me. Watching it work in real-time, you can see it indexing hundreds of pages to make a recommendation.

That was my lightbulb moment. If we know where AI models are looking, what they consider important, and how you stack up relative to competitors, you can start to influence it.

Gregg: What you saw the direction AI was heading relative to decision making, did you and the team make any immediate pivots based on those realizations and where you thought things were headed?

Michael: We did and are continuing to use AI insights to guide future strategy. At the time, Snowbasin had recently been named the No. 1 resort by SKI Magazine, Outside, and USA Today but searches for “best ski resorts” in AI models rarely mentioned Snowbasin. There was clearly a gap that we had to address through their delayed learning.

Individual prompts here and there aren’t a big enough sample size to make business decisions from, so I started spending my nights building Centium.AI to run prompts at scale across the five leading LLMs to truly understand the landscape. At the time, nothing really existed like this, so it was a race to get to this conclusion before the market caught up.

Gregg; What did you start to learn with those initial datasets and versions?

Michael: What we learned was eye opening and really helped reveal opportunities. We increased our investment into PR and media hosting, allocating significant budget to fly in journalists several times per month to experience the resort. We know what media outlets AI considers most authoritative and targeted them.

We enhanced our digital content strategy, providing far more opportunities for AI to index positive stories. This included building an accolades page and retroactively issuing dozens of press releases for any positive award or media mention from authoritative voices. We strived to leave a much bigger digital footprint to lead AI to the conclusion we wanted.

Gregg: Has any of that changed already as you’ve gone along?

Michael: We’re just getting started and still have much more to do. We’re going to put a much greater emphasis on review platforms. How can we push our satisfied customers to public channels where AI can find them? AI models can’t ski the mountain, so it can only make conclusions from what others say about it online.

Gregg: Talk about that shift to really increasing your digital footprint as a brand. Were you already doing things like traditional SEO that involved content generation that’s more designed for the machines as much as humans? Did you have to hire someone to help manage and create all that content or was it more a matter of shifting resources away from other things?

Michael: We primarily shifted resources and priorities, while leaning on AI for increased production. In this industry, it’s common for marketing employees to wear a lot of hats, so we restructured roles to create a better split with a new position that was solely digital performance focused. The addition of this really helped us grow in both traditional SEO and AIO. As a company, we’re looking to further expand in this realm to continue improving.

However, to have good content to push digitally, you need to create great stories and lean into PR. The future of AI visibility is different from SEO, and you need authoritative voices saying you have a quality brand. When AI sees a consistent message across a range of mediums it deems important, from Reddit to earned media to review platforms, it starts to create strong associations. Snowbasin has always been an industry leader in PR, and this year we doubled down with our No. 1 ranking. This all helped lead to an 88% increase in AI visibility for Utah-based ski resort prompts from January to today.

Gregg: Let’s circle back on Centium. Most marketers would search for a tool to do this, come up empty, look at the pile of work they need to do before that pass deadline, shrug your shoulders and move on. What is it about this problem that made you decide to automate this not just for yourself, but for others as well?

Michael: I was initially driven by curiosity. I’ve been fascinated by AI and have been an early adopter of just about every advancement over the years, which has given me an edge. It was one of those moments where I knew this concept of AI discoverability was going to be a core part of marketing in the future, but the mainstream narrative hadn’t caught onto it yet. That presented the opportunity to chase something new and ultimately see if it could be transformational. So, I spent my nights and weekends for nearly a year learning as much as I could and continuing to build to where it is today.

Gregg: Talk about the dev process for Centium. How does a resort marketer end up building a platform like that?

Michael: Centium is truly an AI platform, built using AI-powered technology to measure AI. It started as a spreadsheet, which eventually grew to a PDF report, which eventually evolved into a dashboard, and now has become an interactive platform with automated data feeds flowing into it. While I have exposure to coding and consider myself quite tech-savvy, it’s a journey that required an immense amount of conceptualization, self-teaching, patience, and debugging along the way.

If you take advantage of the latest developments in technology, you can really accomplish some incredible things. AI is advancing at such a rapid pace that it’s very important right now to stay current with the latest tools and trends, because what is possible in 2025 couldn’t be done in 2024.

Gregg: Have you been able to get more people using it yet? Any lessons or trends that are popping up as you see more data for more brands?

Michael: I have, and it has been crucial to have exposure to a wide mix of brands since we’ve learned that AI’s sourcing varies from industry to industry. I released it on LinkedIn last month as a beta, looking for brands across varied industries to work with as I continue development. The response has really blown me away. I’ve worked with global consumer product brands, national agencies, other resorts, and have a long list of major players who expressed interest. The response has indicated that this has very strong potential for product market fit.

This has made Centium a far better experience. The feedback gained has led to several new features like webpage citations from both media stories and brand websites, showing exactly what type of content is moving the needle. I’ve added new AI models like Perplexity and have further expanded the insights that its reporting on, giving marketing leaders the data they need to confidently lead their brand into the future.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.